Working The Trapline — Riflery, Swordplay & The Heart of American Darkness

The great Italian biathlon World Champ Dorothea Wierer — whose strength has always been in her smoking-fast, accurate shooting — has a new gig. She’s launched a biathlon rifle stock-builder called DW One.

As an Italian biathlete, it was a natural step for me, Dorothea Wierer, to use my experience and knowledge to develop a biathlon stock that meets the needs of athletes of all ages and performance levels.

Our biathlonstock was engineered with one clear goal in mind: to offer maximum adaptability and superior performance. With a modern design, we make it possible to adapt the biathlonstock to the athlete down to the smallest detail, from junior to seasoned professional.

Pretty cool…

Here’s a sample of that lights-out shooting:

*

A friend put up a smoke-signal on a forthcoming book that lands squarely in the x-ring of Frontier Partisan Studies:

Parkinson is deliberately riffing off of the title of Joseph Conrad’s legendary Belgian Congo story, Heart of Darkness, which was mined for the themes and plot of Apocalypse Now. Readers here know that frontiers around the globe created a theater that encompassed both herorism and horror — and I’m hopeful that this book illuminates that. Certainly Parkinson has picked the right scarlet thread to follow from the mid-18th Century into the era of the Revolutionary War. Due out in May.

Dig the caper:

An acclaimed historian captures the true nature of imperialism in early America, demonstrating how the frontier shaped the nation.

We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startingly original work, historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork.

“Logan’s Revenge” by Robert W. Griffing. Logan, Talgayeeta, son of Shickellamy.

At the center of Parkinson’s story are two families whose entwined histories ended in tragedy. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. Together, the families helped determine the fate of the British and French empires, which were battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. From the Seven Years’ War to the protests over the Stamp Act to the start of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson recounts the major turning points of the era from a vantage that allows us to see them anew, and to perceive how bewildering they were to people at the time.

For the Shickellamy family, it all came to an end on April 30, 1774, when most of the clan were brutally murdered by white settlers associated with the Cresaps at a place called Yellow Creek. That horrific event became news all over the continent, and it led to war in the interior, at the very moment the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Michael Cresap, at first blamed for the massacre at Yellow Creek, would be transformed by the Revolution into a hero alongside George Washington. In death, he helped cement the pioneer myth at the heart of the new republic.
Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.

*

For all of its vaunted Enlightenment values, the 18th Century was a brutal time, both on the frontiers and in the metropole.

“Look you, the Bear-Garden is preparing, and the Gladiators coming out to entertain the People. And here every thing is dull without Mischief, the Blood must run about to give satisfaction; and all the Pleasure lies in slashing and cutting of Throats…Thus Men are stabbed to divert those of their own Kind; and to kill handsomely goes for Skill, Commendation, and Improvement. Thus Barbarities are not only practised, but taught as a Science: It is an Art to be well prepared, and a Glory to execute the Murder…”

Esteemed historian of the European martial arts, Ben Miller, has a new tome out to complement his studies of 18th Century Irish and Scottish swordsmanship, and it looks like a hum-dinger: The Gladiatory Art: The Lives, Writings, & Techniques of the Eighteenth Century Stage Gladiators. A Sourcebook.

Readers today are familiar with the gladiators of ancient Rome who fought to the death in the Coliseum. Very few, however, are aware of the resurgence of bloody gladiatorial combat which took place in 18th century Britain, in which the so-called “Masters of the Noble Science of Defence,” full of fire and bravado, demonstrated their expertise with sharp broadswords, daggers, shields, quarterstaffs, flails, two-handed swords, and other antiquated weapons before rabid audiences, while risking brutal mutilation and sometimes death for fame, glory, and prize money. Despite the immense popularity they enjoyed during their heyday-which lasted for almost a century-the gladiators have received little attention from scholars and historians, confined instead to a mere chapter in the back of Victorian-era fencing histories.

This, then — the product of nearly two decades of research-is the first book devoted to the lives, writings, and techniques of the 18th century stage gladiators, whose ranks included a number of women (the “Mistresses of the Science of Defence”), fighters of African descent, Native Americans, as well as numerous Irish, Scots, Welsh, and English. Central to this world was the redoubtable James Figg, the most famous of all the gladiators, who managed the infamous “Bear-Garden” amphitheater, and who played a major role in the popularization and dissemination of gladiatorial combat. Joining Figg in his endeavors, and also featured in this book, are a number of other colorful and legendary gladiators, such as the extraordinary Donald McBane of Scotland, Captain James Miller (who penned a treatise on gladiatorial combat), Edward “Ned” Sutton (one of the few men to ever defeat Figg), the “Invincible City Championess” Elizabeth Stokes, and Thomas Barrett, an Irishman said to have fought “600 and odd Battles” before finally meeting his gruesome demise on the stage.

Presented as a primary sourcebook rather than a dense narrative history, this text not only contains the largest number of firsthand accounts and challenges pertaining to the gladiators ever compiled, but also includes the writings of the gladiators themselves (including treatises on technique), a selection of essays, poetry, and songs from the period, a chapter on bare-knuckle boxing (a deadly form which finally superseded gladiatorial combat during the mid eighteenth century), obscure accounts of gladiatorial combat in New England and South America, as well as more than sixty engravings, sketches, and paintings relating to the gladiators from between the years 1680 and 1770.